Last night’s Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Opera House, “Verdi vs Wagner”, was a battle of nasty and nice. Verdi devotee Norman Lebrecht accused Wagner of anti-Semitism, while Wagner worshipper Philip Hensher retorted that “some of the worst operas in the world were written by extremely nice people”.
Wagner won the day with 53 per cent of the vote, thanks in part to the debate’s chair Stephen Fry. A committed Wagnerian, Fry said people would not judge him too harshly “if I wrote an essay today talking about the pernicious influence of American culture on the world. But if, 50 years after I died... there came a leader of the people who rounded up, 10 years later, all Americans that he could and gassed them, then people would look back on my essay... and say ‘that Stephen Fry, he was one of those anti-Americans’.”
